The Power Electronic Building Block (PEBB) is a generic power electronic converter circuit that can be configured in different ways to synthesize popular power electronic architectures (DC-DC, DC-AC, AC-DC, and AC-AC converters). This can reduce the number of spare parts needed onboard a ship, plane, or other such vessel. The PEBB can also reduce the manufacturing cost of power electronic systems because the mass production of one generic power electronic architecture is more economical than producing application-specific power electronic architectures. Many different possible architectures for the PEBB have been proposed, but all of them are either implemented using silicon (Si), silicon carbide (SiC) Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) or Insulated Gate Bipolar Junction Transistors (IGBTs), which suffer from high conduction and switching losses.
A PEBB has been built with gallium nitride (GaN) High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) to reduce the conduction and switching losses of the transistors because the GaN HEMTs have lower on-resistance (Ron) and less device total charge. The major problem with GaN HEMTs is that their breakdown voltage is relatively lower compared to Si and SiC MOSFETs or IGBTs, which limits the utilization of GaN HEMTs in low-voltage applications. Multilevel half-bridge configurations enable the utilization of GaN HEMTs in high-voltage applications. These topologies can possibly be based on a flying capacitor (FC) leg or a neutral point clamped (NPC) leg. The major problem of multilevel configurations is that they require a complex control scheme and more switches (as in the NPC) or more high voltage capacitors (as in the FC).